英文摘要 |
Why do the indigenous peoples aspire to become professional baseball players? a career that is so short? This study explores the disciplinary process and the social mobility through the sport opportunity structure that indigenous adolescents must undergo beginning professional careers. Through nine months of ethnographic observation, this study observed the indigenous players' regular training processes and competitions. These observations were also accompanied with the players' training diaries and in-depth interviews with 76 informants. Byexamining the space-time trajectories and sport socialization in their training process, as well as examining disciplinary process, athletic games and culture, and surveillance mechanisms regarding their mental and ideologicalstates, the reasons why they enthusiastically embrace the intangible output and uncertain reward of baseball training and why they consciously cultivate a sense of self-exploitation and hard practice can be discovered. The following conclusions were obtained: Indigenous baseball players have come up through an nonstandard educational situation and therefore possess a 'survival of the fittest'' mentality. Under this formation of their dispositions and through competing for survival, the baseball field is not simply a place that these indigenous players learn athletic socialization and professionalism. It also becomes an arena where these athletes experience, react to, resist and recognize conventional hierarchical consciousness. Moreover, the indigenous players show characteristics of social mobility differentiation-pursuing the professional baseball career, but with limited alternative opportunities. The comparatively higher ratio of successful cases of indigenous players advancing to professional baseball careers represents the false illusions of the social mobility attainable through this sport, and produces a sport where indigenous peoples find selfidentity and where a social image about indigenous sport achievement is presented, while enhancing social control on the unsuccessful cases and providing them with the justification and mental rationalization of the idea of social inequality. In a nutshell, the social mobility of indigenous players are limited by the hierarchical consciousness resulting from the disciplinary regime, the opportunities available in the chain of advancement in the sport, and the risk of a short-period professional career. Besides creating an occupational homogeneity of ethnic trend and social stacking effects amongst indigenous peoples in regard to their educational choices and occupational attainment,playing baseball also becomes a chain of survival or elimination-for indigenous peoples as they compete with each other for limited opportunities. |